


A Thousand Cities, A Thousand Houses

by sunsxleil



Series: Merry Christmas, I Love You [24]
Category: Carol (2015), The Price of Salt - Patricia Highsmith
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/F, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:35:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28481760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsxleil/pseuds/sunsxleil
Summary: It's been fifteen years since Therese and Carol had met, since the trip west, since all the events in their lives that had led them together. So, Carol suggests they drive west again—if only to finally patch new memories over old, painful ones.
Relationships: Carol Aird/Therese Belivet
Series: Merry Christmas, I Love You [24]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2035672
Comments: 18
Kudos: 57





	1. In The Veranda

**Author's Note:**

> Happy New Year! I wanted this to be a Christmas/NYE post but I've been pretty drained lately, and never had the proper energy to write and give my all to our two ladies here. Anyway, this idea has been brewing in my mind for more than a week or two now, so it's time to add it to the series. I hope you guys enjoy it!

The New Year’s festivities had come and gone, and Therese and Carol were enjoying their first day of the year lounging around on their veranda. That was one thing Therese learned Carol didn’t want to give up from selling her house with Harge—having a bedroom that opens to a veranda. When Therese had first moved in, it was one of the things that grabbed her by the hand and yanked her into complete and utter awe. That awe has since turned to fondness, especially since there was no other place in their apartment Carol loves as much as their veranda.

Other than their bed, of course.

Just like in Carol’s old house with Harge, Carol and Therese’s veranda has a swinging bench to the side, as well as a few plants they’ve accumulated over the years. Carol is fonder of keeping plants than Therese, but Therese has quite the greener thumb. It makes for quite the arrangement; on many occasions, Therese would find Carol lying on the bench, fingers brushing a new bloom and staring it lovingly. Carol would catch Therese staring, and smile with flushed cheeks. “Your flower is blossoming,” Carol would say to her, and sometimes Therese would think that Carol is prouder and fonder of the plants Therese grows than Therese herself. It’s nice though, and Therese doesn’t mind at all.

That New Year’s Day, Therese had been lying on the swinging bench with Carol sitting at the foot of it. Their hands intertwined on Carol’s lap, and they were staring at each other as lovers do, with greenery framing Therese’s face and the free, blue sky framing Carol’s.

Carol pushes their hands off her lap and slides onto Therese, resting her head on Therese’s chest. Carol looks up, and Therese finds her fingers twirling Carol’s hair, drawing circles on Carol’s neck.

“What are you thinking?” Carol asks her. Back in the early days, before Carol invited Therese to The Ritz and before Therese came to The Oak Room, Carol would always ask that question and Therese would never give a straight answer. That was long before Therese learned how to describe her feelings into words.

 _I love you_. But Therese is always thinking that nowadays. “That I want to know what you’re thinking.”

Carol smiles. “You’re always thinking that.”

Therese laughs. “Do you want me to stop?”

Carol scoots, pushing herself up and cupping Therese’s cheek. “No, angel.” Carol looks her in the eye, and there’s a smile in those gray eyes that Therese remembers had never been there before the night Carol saw her standing in The Oak Room. Every day, every month, every year since then, Carol’s eyes never quite dimmed away from that smile. “Don’t ever stop.” Carol kisses Therese, and it’s soft and gentle, like a leaf brushing against her cheek or a petal pressing against her lips.

Carol smells like yellow bells and blue bells, and all the other flowers growing around them in the veranda.

“So,” Therese says when they part. Carol opens her eyes to see bright brown eyes looking at her, and she knows she would die happy having that to stare into every day. “What are _you_ thinking?”

Carol’s head falls down into the crook of Therese’s neck, and Carol nuzzles Therese’s cheek. “I was thinking of driving west with you.”

“Hm?” Therese hums. Carol’s always thinking about those days, so Therese is not quite surprised about that. She thinks about it a lot, too.

“Going back to where we’d gone, make new memories there.” _That_ , Therese did not expect. Granted, Waterloo is a place they’ve been wanting to visit again, but certain other places… Carol puts a hand on Therese’s heart. “Put happy memories where there were hurtful ones.”

When Therese looks down, Carol is looking up at her. The wounds have scabbed over and the scars have since then healed, and it’s been years since Therese has looked at Carol and felt even the echo of the pain from when Carol had left her. Still, months into their relationship, it had become an unspoken agreement never to speak of that day again. Carol’s letter, they speak of only rarely, and that already pushed the boundaries.

But it’s been years since then. Therese looks down at a woman that she’s spent the past fifteen years with, through sickness and health, for richer or poorer, in love and in argument. The Carol she looks at now is a far cry from the woman who had left her, the woman who had swept her into running away from their problems only for it all to come crashing down on them both.

This Carol chooses her every day, and they deal with their problems together.

Therese puts a hand on Carol’s hand on her heart. Therese smiles. “I’d like that.”

Carol closes her eyes as the breeze blows by and this, this is not bliss, unlike what Therese had felt lying on the swinging bench in the veranda at Carol’s old house with Harge. No, this is happiness.

Carol moves her head away from the crook of Therese’s neck to kiss the knuckles on her hand, and Therese imagines this is what all the married couples feel when their grooms or brides are reciting their vows. Carol’s breath whispers over Therese’s ring finger, and it’s a promise, a promise of a lifetime spent growing and healing together, becoming one in more than one essence, in more than just nights spent in bed together.

It’s enough, more than enough for Therese, to be here with Carol and for Carol to be here with her. They need no marriage to cement what they already have, and any rite would just be a formality.


	2. On the Road

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that took a while to write. I hope the wait's worth it!

“Ready?”

It’s all the same and it’s all different. It’s still Carol’s long dark green car with its dark green leather upholstery, and the coffee in their thermos is still light brown, strong and a little sweet. Carol’s once again in the driver’s seat wearing her fur coat, and Therese is once again in the passenger seat, with her scarf around her neck.

Carol looks at Therese with a smile on her face, and Therese is taken back in time and zapped into the future. It feels like fifteen years ago and fifteen years later, and right here and right now. That’s how Therese knows that she could be nineteen or thirty-four or forty-nine and it would not matter, because it would be Carol beside her, always and forever.

Therese smiles.

“Ready.”

When Carol smiles before pressing down on accelerate, Therese thinks it almost looks like a wedding vow. It’s the same smile Therese has only seen through her lenses at weddings, one-of-a-kind, a smile that seems to only be saved for a bride or a groom.

For someone a person would spend their life with, till death do they part.

As they drive away from their Madison Avenue apartment, Therese rests her hand on Carol’s thigh. Carol spares no glance at her, but the familiar small smile that graces Carol’s face is enough to tell Therese that the touch is as welcome as it always is. Therese recalls fifteen years ago, driving away from New Jersey and heading to Chicago with barely a sight of city around them. Now, they drive away from New York, the city fading behind them as fast as the traffic can take them.

So much of this route has changed since Therese moved in with Carol. Therese remembers there being a lot fewer cars, for instance, and the fields didn’t feel as busy. Now, the fields on either side of the highway buzzes as loud as the cars whizzing past them, where Therese used to be able to lean her ear towards the window and find the faintest sound of birdsong in the distance.

Still, as much as the route itself has changed, the road is still the same one that Carol had driven on when they had their first trip together, though now lighter and more cracked. Their trip west, from a long time ago, and yesterday all the same.

“Do you remember when I asked you what you were thinking on the road?” Carol asks. Carol’s smile tells Therese she remembers it as if it had happened yesterday, and all Therese can do is smile back, confused. “You’d looked so troubled. Not even a day away with me and I’d already given you a rotten time.”

Therese shakes her head and laughs. “Oh, I was probably thinking of something or another.”

“Well,” Carol nudges her head to the side. “I’d figured that.”

Therese shakes her head, but not without the corners of her lips curving up. Oh Carol, _her_ Carol. “I was never really good at telling you what I was thinking.”

Carol laughs, and when Therese looks over to her, Carol’s smiling.

“What are you thinking?”

Carol spares a glance at her, and there’s a shy look there, but not enough to mask the brightness in Carol’s eyes.

“How far you’ve come from the girl I met at the department store.”

Cruising down the highway, Carol rests one hand on Therese’s, and squeezes it. Therese _has_ come a long way from the girl she had been back when she first met Carol. Back then, she was wide-eyed, completely entranced by Carol and ready to abandon (and she did abandon) everything in her life that had nothing to do with Carol. Everything had been dull and gray, and Carol had been the only source of color.

As it often happens when one is so in awe of something, Therese had spent most of her time in awe of Carol—always just admiring her and the way she stood out from the rest of Therese’s world. Flung out of space, Carol called it. Looking back, Therese can see that it hadn’t just been Carol keeping a distance then. Admiring Carol all the time meant that Therese had always stayed a sort of distance from Carol, hence the usual lack of a proper response to Carol’s questions of ‘what are you thinking?’

But now, that distance has been crossed—no longer flung out of space, and instead in each other’s orbit.

Carol glances at Therese, and not for the first time that day (or any day, really), Carol catches Therese staring.

“What are you thinking?”

Therese leans her head on the headrest. “I love you.”

“Oh,” Carol says, pink coloring her cheeks as she looks back at the road. “You’re always thinking that.” Therese doesn’t miss the small smile on Carol’s lips, or the way Carol bites her lip. If they had been in bed and Therese’s ear had been against Carol’s chest, Therese would have heard Carol’s heart skip a beat.

For a while, Carol just drives. Therese would like to think it’s the way that they are surrounded by little to no neighborhoods, or that it’s the way they whiz past anyone who might peer into their windows and spot the way they look at each other, but Therese stares at Carol the whole time. At times, Carol blushes, and at other times, she smirks, and even Abby had found it a wonder that it’s been fifteen years and Carol and Therese have yet to stop acting like they’ve just met. Abby even teased them once, about acting like a couple of newlyweds. _“What, like I would want to stop touching **that**?”_ Carol had said, and it had taken a moment, but Abby had burst out laughing and Therese had flushed beet red. Carol had done nothing else than look past the windshield with a satisfied expression on her face.

Though, Therese would not want to stop touching or looking at Carol any time soon either. If she could be paid to look at Carol all day, she thinks, she’d take that job. Oh, and the adventure it would be to get Carol’s face to make expressions Therese has never seen before—especially in bed.

“Do you still remember where we’d gone to lunch on our trip?” Carol asks.

“I might remember it when I see it.” Therese says.

Carol laughs. When it comes to routes, they will either fight or they will get lost. On more than a few occasions, both had happened. “A late lunch it is, then.” Eventually, they both just admitted to sparing more time for getting lost when going somewhere they’ve never driven to before.

Though memory would have worked just well here, it _had_ been fifteen years since they’ve been here. Some establishments had since been gone, replaced. Some had changed their look, and new roads tend to aid in confusing anyone using memories from fifteen years ago to navigate through the town, so memory would not work.

“Maybe it’s down here?” Therese asks.

“I don’t remember going _that_ out of the way for some lunch.”

Carol drives on, and Therese looks left and right for the place they had lunch in, the place where Therese had snapped her first picture of Carol during the trip, after she had given her the Billie Holiday record.

Therese did not spot the place as they were about to exit the town.

Carol put her back into turning the wheel at the last corner before they left town. “Let’s take a look at that corner again, shall we?”

Therese smiles, and Carol shakes her head, her lips a growing mirror of Therese’s.

As it is, they ended up having a late lunch after going around town for at least half an hour before Carol finally gave in to Therese’s suggestions of trying to ask around town. They did not remember the name of the diner, but a few descriptions from their memory of it was enough for a few people to give them bits and pieces to lead them to the diner.

Walking in, they find the booths each still have coat racks like they did the first time they came here. Therese and Carol exchange a look, and Therese feels excitement blossom in her chest—and from the way Carol smiles at her, Therese can tell Carol feels the exact same way.

“I think I’d like to taste something new.” Carol says.

Therese raises a brow. Back then, she had ordered the same thing Carol did, just like the first time they had lunch together. But, back then, Therese had not known anything of what she liked. Not really.

“I’ll take the chocolate porridge and some coffee.” Therese replies. Carol smiles, because she knows Therese is the more outwardly sentimental of the two of them, and it always warms Carol’s heart to see Therese this way. It’s how Therese reassures Carol of her value to her, that she has not forgotten the little things, and probably never will.

“Alright then.”

They sit there, eating their late lunch, hands on the table close enough to touch. Their fingers play around as they always do, never quite resting on each other’s hand lest someone see it. One look at the other is enough to get the thought across though: ‘I love you. I want to hold your hand. I wish you would stop playing around and just let me hold your hand.’ There is no Billie Holiday record now, nor does Therese take Carol’s picture. Somehow, though, this is better, nicer, more fitting to do after fifteen years together—and anyway, every time Carol’s looking at Therese, it’s like Therese had just given her that record. And every time Therese looks at Carol, it’s like Therese is snapping that picture again.

After lunch, they drive. They drive until the sun falls down on them, and they find the place they had once stayed in. They check into Room 11, luckily vacant, just as they had fifteen years ago.

In bed that night—and their room has two beds, just to be safe, but of course they only use one—Carol’s hand wraps around Therese’s waist, while the other holds Therese’s hair away from her face.

Therese’s fingers brush Carol’s jaw. “What are you thinking?” Therese asks.

Carol’s eyes soften. “That I love you.”

Therese reaches further up to hold Carol’s jaw between her fingers and kisses her once before they both fall asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was supposed to just be a 3-chapter fic, but the more I wrote, the more I felt like it wouldn't be. For now, I'm keeping it as possibly 4 chapters, but who knows what'll happen? Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed that :))


	3. Between The Sky and The Grass & Around The Music

The sky is far above them, yet if Therese stretches out her hand, she thinks she might be able to touch the clouds.

Carol and Therese had discarded their shoes a while ago and now lie on the picnic blanket they’ve lain by the side of the road. Therese can feel the grass brushing her heels, resting past where the blanket covered.

“We should do this more often. What do you think?” Carol asks. Though Carol’s head is not on Therese’s shoulder as they both want it to be, Carol’s fingers slip beneath Therese’s hand.

“The trip or the picnic?”

“The picnic,” Carol says. She takes a bite from the sandwich they’d bought from a diner they passed, and holds it over for Therese to take a bite as well. “And the trip as well, if you want it.”

Therese takes a bite of the offered sandwich, and looks over at Carol: Carol, with her hair as blonde as ever, gray eyes looking silver, her face bright as the late morning sun, looking at Therese, beaming. The sky and the fields frame Carol, and there is nothing else, no one else, just Carol with Therese in front of her.

Carol juts her jaw at Therese. “What are you thinking?”

Therese smiles. Carol gives her a knowing look, and it delights them both that it’s easier now to keep Therese’s thoughts from silence, unlike before.

“That you’re beautiful,” Therese says. “That I’d like to take a picture of you. And that I love you.”

Unlike earlier in the trip, when Carol had flushed from Therese’s surprise ‘I love you’, Carol only smiles now. She expected it, and perhaps it’s because it was written all over Therese’s face that she wanted to say it. She always wants to say it, yes, but in that moment more than most.

Carol’s eyes soften, and she leans in close to Therese.

Whether there really is no one to see them, or if they risk being sighted by some random passersby on this highway, Carol kisses Therese anyway, and Therese kisses her back.

Carol’s lips taste like coffee and tuna.

“What was that about taking a picture of me?”

Therese finds a teasing look in Carol’s gray eyes.

“Sit for me then.” Therese responds.

Therese leans back for her camera in her bag as Carol sits back down on her side of the picnic blanket. Carol watches Therese rummage through her bag and thinks she likes this view, of Therese being Therese against a great blue sky and far-reaching greenery.

Not that New York City didn’t prove good scenery but… nothing beats pretty country. Especially with a pretty girl.

“Alright.” Therese sits back on her haunches and brings her camera to her eye. It’s still the one Carol had bought her fifteen years ago, and sure, Carol had tried to buy her new ones, but Therese seemed adamant on using this one until it became completely irreparable. Carol would usually scoff, tease Therese that Therese might start liking that camera more than she likes Carol, but now all Carol can do is bite her lip.

Oh, a pretty girl, a sweet girl, all hers and hers to love.

Therese smiles behind the camera.

“Why are you smiling?” Carol asks.

Therese snaps a picture. “Why are you biting your lip?”

Carol winks at the camera. “Thinking how nice it would be to have a pretty girl across my lap right about now.”

Therese bites her lip, and Carol smirks. Therese shakes her head, and tries to steady her hands for another picture. _Tries_. “You’re daring.” Therese teases.

“Oh, well.” Carol pushes herself off the blanket and crawls over to Therese. She spots Therese taking a couple more shots before she reaches out and sets the camera aside—and _there_ it is. Her _favorite_ pretty face in the whole world. “Only for my darling.”

Carol kisses her, full on the lips, and they fall onto the blanket as if they’re falling onto their bed back in their New York apartment. They laugh, as lovers do, and it soon becomes hard to distinguish what is a laugh and what is a kiss, because the taste of Therese’s lips is just as prevalent as the clang of her teeth on Carol’s.

Therese pulls away, smiling and giggling and laughing as much as Carol. Carol still chases her lips, but one look at Therese’s eyes makes Carol chuckle, and nuzzle against Therese’s nose instead.

It’s a while before either of them speaks again. When one of them does, it’s Therese’s voice that fills their comfortable silence.

“What?” She asks Carol.

“What?” Carol asks her back.

They lie there with their arms and hands wrapped around each other’s waist, the silent country offering them peace and quiet as they just watch the other: _my angel, my love, now and forever_.

Carol leans forward and kisses Therese. Soft, firm, long, certain. Carol smiles, and when her eyes flutter open, Therese thinks she sees the silver gates of heaven. “Should we do _this_ more often?”

Therese feels herself mirroring Carol’s lips. “What?”

Carol’s eyes soften. “Spend the afternoon like this.” Carol did not have to say the rest of it. ‘Like any other couple, _as if_ they were like any other couple.’ And, really, what was the difference? They loved each other as much as any couple they see having lunch or a stroll in the park, loved each other as much as if not more than those couples that spent days looking at Christmas gifts together, perhaps for their in-laws, perhaps for their children.

Instead of filling the silence, Therese just stares into Carol’s eyes. Oh, what it would be like to spend an afternoon with Carol, with no one to interrupt them, lying down on the grass and staring up at her, only to lean up for a kiss every now and again.

“I’d like that.” Therese says. Carol smiles, and her brows meet in the middle the way they usually do when Carol’s on the brink of tears. _I’d ask you to marry me_ , Therese wants to say, though they know that would never come to fruition. _I would say yes_ , Therese can see in Carol’s eyes, and perhaps they will never really need rings, no—Therese being in Carol’s arms and Carol being in Therese’s arms is enough, in this moment, to prove they will be together till death do they part.

Perhaps they’d been staring at each other for a few minutes or a whole hour—it didn’t quite matter. All their time is their own now, and they were no longer running from jealous ex-husbands or a dull worker’s life as they did before. At some point, they pack up their food and their picnic blanket with no rush, and get back on the road like they had all the time to stop here, and all the time to keep going.

Really, they had all the time in the world.

The sun has become quite low as they drive on, and Therese wonders if she had felt this peaceful back then, as if any number of sunsets could fall on them, and it would not matter.

They find themselves in Ohio by nightfall, rolling into a familiar motel where they take the presidential suite that is fortunately vacant. The price had changed over the years, of course, but the rate no longer being attractive didn’t diminish the charm of the place.

It’s still a big room, almost just how Therese remembers it, if not with changed sheets and possibly faded wallpaper.

“Remember when I had you put on some of my perfume?” Carol asks. Therese turns to find Carol huffing onto the bed, suitcase popped open beside her. “And you were such a dear not to lean in too close when smelling the perfume on me?”

Carol looks at Therese with a teasing smirk. The smile on Therese’s face blooms slow, and she shakes her head at the memory. Carol, oh Carol—her Carol is such a flirt and Therese could be so daft about it sometimes.

“Yes?”

“Well,” Carol says, “you better be less of a dear tonight.”

Therese rolls her eyes. There’s that glint in Carol’s eyes that could go either way: both of them in bed, or Carol continuing to help unpack their luggage. Carol likely meant what she said as a joke, though they both know it could transform beyond being a joke if Therese makes the right move. At that possibility, Therese knows that in the inside, Carol is biting her lip, waiting to see if Therese goes for the bait. She doesn’t, and instead unpacks their toiletries and throws it in Carol’s direction.

The pack lands on Carol’s bed, and Carol laughs. It’s a colorful sound that makes Therese’s chest bloom—it’s suddenly hard to keep her eyes off the angel in the room. “Dinner first,” Therese says over Carol’s laughter. Carol pauses her laughter to look at Therese, and Therese thinks Carol looks like a child, bright and innocent and _in the moment_ , smiling at her. “Then I want us to dance.” Therese holds up a record. Carol’s eyes dart from Therese to the record and back, and her eyes soften.

Carol has always loved dancing with Therese.

They eat dinner first, at the diner by the front desk of the motel, then they retreat back to their room and load the phonograph with some records.

“Would mademoiselle give me the pleasure of having her first dance?” Carol asks. Her gray eyes look like the gleam of glass chandeliers, and Therese smiles.

“I’d love to.” Therese says. She lets Carol take her by the hand, lead her into the open space in the suite with one hand to guide her and the other on her waist.

The opening notes of _You Belong to Me_ by Helen Foster plays, and they settle into a slow rhythm, their hips swaying in time with the music and with nothing at all but their heartbeats. Carol lets both hands settle around Therese’s waist, and Therese wraps her arms around Carol. This, Therese thinks, is nice. It is perfect—to dance with the love of her life with no care at all in the world, no person looking in for them to satisfy nor person to avoid from stopping them. Just dancing, with Carol, in this motel suite from fifteen years ago, smelling still like the perfume Carol had put on her that night, after the make-up and a few sips of whiskey and a few runs of _Easy Living_.

Carol in her arms feels nice, Therese thinks, and looking up at her angel with silver-gray eyes makes her sigh. She leans in to Carol’s touch and rests her cheek on Carol’s shoulder.

 _I love you_ , she thinks.

Therese, Carol thinks, is warm and here, and Carol could no longer imagine a life without her angel with her. It was fitting then, for them to come back here, like a message to their younger selves of ‘don’t worry, it will all work out, so don’t spend the time you have worrying about things miles away’. Dancing with Therese now feels like Carol’s message to herself, that none of it is a mistake, that there was not one moment since she found Therese in that department store that could have been better off changed. Call it as one may: reckless, impulsive, even childish—it would have been more foolish to have undone it all, to un-meet the woman she was so fated to spend the rest of her life with.

Therese. _My angel_.

Carol closes her eyes and she breathes it all in. She presses her nose into Therese’s hair, breathing in Therese’s shampoo, the same one that Therese had switched to after they’d found her usual one out of stock, and Carol was subsequently left nearly glued to the back of Therese’s head. The same one that Carol had massaged into Therese’s hair, time and time again, the sharper smell of unrinsed shampoo stark in Carol’s memory at every kiss, every bath together.

Carol rests her chin on Therese’s shoulder. “What are you thinking?”

Therese turns her cheek to burrow her nose into Carol’s dress. It smells like perfume, and the detergent they use to wash their clothes. “That I’m happy, right now, with you. What are you thinking?”

Carol smiles. “I’m thinking that I’m happy too.”

Carol can feel Therese smiling into her shoulder, knows Therese can feel her heart beating so heavily as if on Carol is on the cusp of either crying or laughing. She can feel Therese taking a breath, could almost feel Therese’s heart beating on her chest. “Why are you happy?” Therese asks.

It’s a rhetorical question, almost, so Carol laughs. A soft laugh. “Because I’m with you.” It comes out as a whisper and Carol closes her eyes, leans the side of her head on Therese’s.

Therese chuckles. She pulls away from Carol’s shoulder and angles her face up, up so her mouth is just under Carol’s jaw. She kisses the underside of Carol’s jaw, the pulse point on Carol’s neck, the skin under Carol’s ear, the top of Carol’s cheekbone, the tip of Carol’s nose.

“I love you.” Therese says.

Gray eyes flutter open and scan Therese’s, and Carol’s hand comes up to cradle Therese’s cheek. ‘ _I love you._ ’ Carol twirls strands falling over Therese’s face and pushes it aside, making way for a clear view of her lover in front of her. ‘ _I love you._ ’ Her eyes dart around. Therese’s eyes, nose, cheeks, forehead, lips, chin, cheekbones, eyes, brows, lashes, eyelids, eyes, nose, lips, hairline. ‘ _I love you._ ’ Carol takes a breath, and another, and lets her eyes settle on Therese’s eyes. They peer up at her as if Carol were the universe, and she could never wrap her head around how one person can look at her like that, how _this person_ could look at her like that and go through fifteen years and still never stop.

Carol breathes in. She thinks she might cry.

“I love you, my angel.” She says, and kisses Therese on the mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That took a while! I was planning to have this whole fic finished by the end of January, but then I thought, I can't rush quality can I? Anyway, all mistakes are mine, and I hope you guys enjoyed that!


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